A Machine That Eats Books: Reflecting on the Impact of AI on Our Understanding of Reality Through Inkle’s TR-49
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
About 20 minutes into Inkle’s new narrative puzzle game, TR-49 (inkle studios, 2026), the main character, Abby, asks Liam, her mysterious, unseen companion, “So there are books inside this thing?” Liam answers, "This machine was built to understand things that no one else can understand. To find meaning where meaning is obscure [...] And the way it does it… is by eating books. I mean it eats them. It chews them up. Swallows them whole.” The game is a database narrative (Hayles, 2007; Manovich, 1999) of the type seen in Her Story (Barlow, 2015) and The Return of the Obra Dinn (Pope, 2018). Much of the gameplay involves piecing together a story by naming and making connections between visually distorted fragments of text to restore the machine’s archive and find a particular book for which you only know the title. As you connect titles to texts, the texts themselves, and the underlying narrative, gradually becomes clearer.
Alluding to the roots of modern computing in World War II code-breaking machines, the game explores the ways in which the stories we tell can change our reality, and the dangers of relying on a machine to create and maintain those stories. Through a close reading of the game, in this presentation I will look at both how the game embodies its meaning in the mechanics of deciphering the archive, and how this sense-making process can help us to think more deeply about the impact of AI on our understanding of our current reality.
References
Barlow, S. (2015). Her Story [Computer software]. Sam Barlow.
Hayles, N. K. (2007). Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts. PMLA, 122(5), 1603–1608.
inkle studios. (2026). TR-49 [Computer software]. inkle studios.
Manovich, L. (1999). Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 5(2), 80–99.
Pope, L. (2018). Return of the Obra Dinn [Computer software].
A Machine That Eats Books: Reflecting on the Impact of AI on Our Understanding of Reality Through Inkle’s TR-49
Algorithms & Imaginaries
About 20 minutes into Inkle’s new narrative puzzle game, TR-49 (inkle studios, 2026), the main character, Abby, asks Liam, her mysterious, unseen companion, “So there are books inside this thing?” Liam answers, "This machine was built to understand things that no one else can understand. To find meaning where meaning is obscure [...] And the way it does it… is by eating books. I mean it eats them. It chews them up. Swallows them whole.” The game is a database narrative (Hayles, 2007; Manovich, 1999) of the type seen in Her Story (Barlow, 2015) and The Return of the Obra Dinn (Pope, 2018). Much of the gameplay involves piecing together a story by naming and making connections between visually distorted fragments of text to restore the machine’s archive and find a particular book for which you only know the title. As you connect titles to texts, the texts themselves, and the underlying narrative, gradually becomes clearer.
Alluding to the roots of modern computing in World War II code-breaking machines, the game explores the ways in which the stories we tell can change our reality, and the dangers of relying on a machine to create and maintain those stories. Through a close reading of the game, in this presentation I will look at both how the game embodies its meaning in the mechanics of deciphering the archive, and how this sense-making process can help us to think more deeply about the impact of AI on our understanding of our current reality.
References
Barlow, S. (2015). Her Story [Computer software]. Sam Barlow.
Hayles, N. K. (2007). Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts. PMLA, 122(5), 1603–1608.
inkle studios. (2026). TR-49 [Computer software]. inkle studios.
Manovich, L. (1999). Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 5(2), 80–99.
Pope, L. (2018). Return of the Obra Dinn [Computer software].
Bio
Alex Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. His research investigates defamiliarization in gameplay, formalist approaches to game analysis, motivations for replaying story-focused games, authoring tools for interactive stories, and collaborative storytelling. Recent publications include Videogame Formalism: On Form, Aesthetic Experience and Methodology (AUP, 2023), “From playing the story to gaming the system: Repeat experiences of a large language model-based interactive story” (ICIDS, 2023), and The Authoring Problem: Challenges in Supporting Authoring for Interactive Digital Narratives (Springer, 2023). He is a founding member of the executive board of the Association for Research in Interactive Digital Narratives (ARDIN).